Nadine Coyle is back – and she’s not messing about. Some seven years after her debut solo album Insatiable, the singer is back and doing what she knows best: working on music exclusively with the production team behind Girls Aloud’s hits, Xenomania.

Led by Brian Higgins, Xenomania were responsible for the group’s first single after forming on Popstars: The Rivals, Sound of the Underground, and together they notched up 21 Top 10 singles – including four Number 1s.

The first fruits of their two years in the studio together, Go To Work, was released yesterday; and it’s a slice of ’90s-tinged house pop that feels bang up to date. We sat down with Nadine to find about more about what we can expect from this long, long awaited reunion.

Nadine – you’re back! What took you so long?

“It really was just about getting the songs. The best songs I could get. And a team. It takes a long to get good songs, it really does! But we’re here now.”

And the single, Go To Work, is a bit of a banger isn’t it?

“It’s classic Xenomania, isn’t just? Just throw all the hooks in there. Why have one hook when you can have ten?”

It’s also perfect timing what with it back the ‘back to school’ period of the year…

“Back to school, back to work, GET ON WITH IT basically!”

What alcoholic beverage would Go To Work be?

“An Espresso Martini. It’s strong but classy. Don’t drink those at night by the way. I had three in one evening and was still up watching the sun rise the next day.”

And if it was an emoji?

“The nail painting one. My favourite emoji is the wink and kiss emoji, but that can come across a bit creepy can’t it?”

In an ideal world there would be a commemorative plaque above the entrance of Liverpool’s Echo arena. “Here ended Girls Aloud, the last great girl band” it would say. On 20 March 2013 Nadine Coyle – one fifth of the genre-bending, pop-reshaping rabble – was getting ready for the final night of the band’s reunion tour. “I was in hair and makeup,” she explains in a north London restaurant, “going through my nightly ritual.” Rather than taking delivery of a good-luck bouquet, Coyle received some news via the band’s PR and manager – the other girls wanted to call it quits. Not the more fashionable “hiatus”, which they’d already done in 2009, but a proper split. With the band working to majority rule, there was nothing she could do.

“It was shocking. We’d signed a new deal and recorded what was basically another new album.” Confused, she marched into the venue’s green room, ignoring video directors there to record the tour for posterity (a DVD), and confronted recent Celebrity Big Brother winner, and closest ally in the band, Sarah Harding. “I said, ‘Do you want to break up the band as well?’ and she was like, ‘Oh fuck it, I can’t be arsed with it, I fucking hate everybody.’ That last show, all emotion was switched off as far as I was concerned, with any of them.”

Further ignominy followed: it had been decided the split announcement would be made that same night. Via a tweet. “A tweet?!” Coyle roars in her thick Derry accent. “I saw the draft and just said, ‘Remove my name from that.’ We’d been saying since the start we were properly back.” In the end the tweet went out as the stage was being dismantled. After an end-of-tour party that lasted until the next morning (“[the band] wasn’t drinking together, but we were in the same room”), Coyle posted her own tweet: “You should know by now I had no part in any of this split business. I couldn’t stop them. I had the best time & want to keep going.” Aside from Harding, she’s not spoken to the rest of the band since.

Fifteen years after they formed via ITV’s Popstars: The Rivals, and four years since the split, Coyle has reunited with Girls Aloud’s unofficial sixth member, Howard Hughes-esque production genius Brian Higgins and his coterie of pop mavericks, AKA Xenomania, for new single Go to Work. Alongside lyricist Miranda Cooper, Higgins masterminded 20 of their UK Top 10 singles, including Biology, Love Machine and Something New, shredding the pop rulebook, spray-painting it neon and then painstakingly suturing it all back together to create a Frankenstein’s monster-pop that made everything else – with its boring verse-chorus-verse structure – look decidedly pedestrian.

Nadine Coyle talks new music, being a Girls Aloud fangirl and calling her fans her Passports…

She’s back, bitches.

Nadine Coyle stormed into New Music Friday this week by telling everyone to Go To Work over a thumping club beat and infectious pop chorus, teaming back up with Xenomania who she worked with on most of Girls Aloud’s biggest hits.

“It’s terrifying to release songs,” she told Gay Times when we sat down with her at the office of her new record label, Virgin EMI.

The singer likened the experience to running and running and running through lovely scenery and then jumping off a cliff and hoping you land somewhere.

But Go To Work feels like the proper launch of a solo Nadine Coyle, hearing her distinctive vocal lead a pop production she’s been accustomed to for 15 years now. But in true Xenomania style, there were plenty of different version before this one.

“When I recorded the chorus, it was so laid back and soulful almost,” she told us. “The track was completely different when I first sang over that wee bit.

“Then we did more parts, and more parts, and more parts, and then there were three versions. We didn’t know which one was going to be the lead single.

“The other two have different verse parts on it are now going out as part of a package, but at one point they were both contenders to be the actual single.”

Nadine has been busy in the studio with Xenomania for quite some time now, having recorded over a hundred songs with the hit-making team.

“We’ve got four singles back-to-back. It was really hard to get to that, because what style do you go with?” she said.

Surely that means there’s an album on the horizon then?

“I don’t even know, to be honest, if it’s going to be a classic singles then album type of situation. Everything is so different now. We’ll just go with it and see, but it would be great.”

Nadine seems cautious about committing to her fans about a full album at this point possibly because of how Insatiable played out seven years ago.

Many consider the collection an underrated pop gem, but because of a unique distribution deal with Tesco back in 2010 where it would only sold in their stores, it stalled at No.47 on the UK chart.

“At the time it was about trying something new,” she told us. “It seemed like it was all written out perfectly. But there was such a move to things being online and it just wasn’t available online anywhere, so you basically had to be in select stores or you just couldn’t get it.

“This time it’s a lot less on me. The last time I did this it was just a lot of pressure on me in terms of having to be the infrastructure. I had to basically be this building. It was impossible and I wouldn’t want to do it that way again.”

But through the ups and the downs, Nadine’s very passionate (and largely gay) fan base have stuck with her, essentially turning some of her iconic moments into fabulous memes.

In a revealing interview, Nadine blows the lid on Girls Aloud tensions, their eventual break up and Sarah Harding’s recent Big Brother stint. Plus she also discusses details of her new music, her growing family, and her relationship with Louis Walsh.

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